Suicide in the Garden, Murder in the Kitchen

For three summers, I’ve lived in a place with a back yard. The back yard has in it a tree that for two summers seemed to be just a normal tree—a bit scraggly, a bit of a nuisance, dropping leaves everywhere and taking up most of the yard, but otherwise unremarkable. This year, the tree spontaneously combusted with green nubs that a friend who’s an expert in such things diagnosed as apricots. The apricots covered the tree like a rash, and as spring turned to summer they swelled and began turning orange. It was as if the tree’s immune system had been working overtime to suppress a terrible affliction and had finally given up. “How did this happen?” I asked my friend. “Rebounding bee populations,” he said. “Or else a boy tree moved into the neighborhood.”

This was a month and a half ago. At that point, the apricots had been around long enough that I’d begun to believe that they would simply stay frozen on their branches forever, an idea I liked. I was getting used to my tree’s fruity new appearance and, while fresh-picked apricots sound delicious, fresh-picked apricots grown in Queens a half-mile from the East River do not. I resolved not to eat the apricots, no matter what happened. If this seems cruel to you, I imagine you have never lived with an apricot tree. An apricot tree produces not just one or two manageable pounds of fruit: it produces more apricots than a single person could eat in a lifetime. It produces thousands of apricots, many of them clinging to branches twenty feet in the air, so that you’ll never reach them. I put questions about what would happen should the fruit ever fully ripen out of my mind: I had no ladder; I couldn’t prepare for such an eventuality.

On Monday, I got my answer. I’d been out of town the previous week, leaving a clean back yard and a tree as serenely fruited as one in a still-life. I returned to a crime scene. A hundred or so apricots, perhaps feeling dejected by my indifference and believing I’d abandoned them for good, had leapt to their deaths. They lay strewn about the courtyard, some with seeds poking through black holes of rot, some that appeared at first glance whole and alive but crawled with ants when rolled over. The apricots that remained in the branches had grown obscene: they’d swollen to a violent red and their fuzz stood on end. I borrowed a ladder from my neighbor.

The whole incident was made somewhat less traumatizing by the reading I’d taken with me on vacation: the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Its theme is food, and it is my favorite thing I’ve read this summer. It contains a vivid array of writing about eating and cooking and all things epicurean from history: Erasmus on being properly voided before dining; Evelyn Waugh on gluttony and the armistice; Madhur Jaffrey on why Hindus won’t sip each other’s drinks; John Smith on the man who powdered and ate his wife during the catastrophe at Jamestown. All full of plentiful food-related terror. But the one that gave me true succor was a passage from Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook. She describes being forced to learn to cook while living in France during the war, when food was scarce. “It was at this time,” she writes, “that murder in the kitchen began”:

The first victim was a lively carp brought to the kitchen in a covered basket from which nothing could escape. The fish man who sold me the carp said he had no time to kill, scale, or clean it, nor would he tell me with which of these horrible necessities one began. It wasn’t difficult to know which was the most repellent. So quickly to the murder and have it over with…. After an appraising glance at the lively fish, it was evident he would escape attempts aimed at his head. A heavy sharp knife came to my mind as the classic, the perfect choice, so grasping—with my left hand well covered with a dishcloth, for the teeth might be sharp—the lower jaw of the carp, and the knife in my right, I carefully, deliberately found the found the base of its vertebral column and plunged the knife in. I let go my grasp and looked to see what had happened. Horror of horrors. The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second, and third degrees. Limp, I fell into a chair, with my hands still unwashed reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and waited for the police to come and take me into custody.

The passage soothed me because as evil as it may be to neglect one’s apricots and send them plummeting to their deaths at least I was not guilty of pescacide, at least I was not as heartless as Alice B. Toklas.

Still, I desired penance: I washed a dozen apricots and placed them in a porcelain bowl. Removed to the domestic setting, they looked happy and perfect, just as if they’d been purchased with money at a market. An hour later, I’d eaten them all, East River be damned. They were delicious.